I know that the subject line of this email is kind of weird, so let me set this up for you. Today's email isn't so much about martial art school owners acting like spoiled kids...

Nope. What it's really about is your willingness or lack of willingness to spend money on your marketing with outside vendors.

And what does that have to do with being spoiled? Hang on, I'm gonna get to that in a minute.

I work with a lot of school owners, some one-on-one but most of them I work with online. And inevitably the question/issue that always comes up when I start working with someone is the quality of their marketing.

See, martial artists are control freaks, plain and simple. We want to control everything in our businesses. There's nothing wrong with that, but somehow we think that exerting that level of control means doing everything ourselves.

Sometimes it's just because a school owner is cheap. Again, there's nothing wrong with that, but you want to be cheap about the right things. Living frugally while you're launching your dojo so you have less overhead to worry about = good cheap.

But skimping on your marketing? Bad cheap.

Look, you are not an expert at everything. All successful people specialize, and chances are good that your specialization is not graphic design, web design, and writing sales copy. 

So, when you skimp on your marketing by trying to design and write your own ads, chances are very good that it's going to look like an 8-year-old did it. Which makes your business look bad, and defeats the entire purpose of marketing.

And just what is the entire purpose of marketing?

To entice or convince someone to respond to your advertising by taking a desired action, whether it's filling out a web form, picking up the phone to contact you, walking in your front door, or clicking a "buy this special" button on your website.

So what does that have to do with being spoiled?

Everything, because in the age of the internet, everyone expects to be able to market for free.

I mean, you can put up a business page on Facebook for free, you can post videos on YouTube for free... heck, you can even build a website for free.*

But just because something is free, it doesn't mean it's not costing you anything. That website you built yourself may be free, but it might be costing you several thousand a month in lost business.